


As dust dances

by Trash



Category: Linkin Park
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-02
Updated: 2013-01-02
Packaged: 2017-11-23 09:15:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/620508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trash/pseuds/Trash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The way we make our money is – I walk three blocks to the graveyard with a shovel at three ante meridiem and go body snatching.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As dust dances

The way we make our money is – I walk three blocks to the graveyard with a shovel at three ante meridiem and go body snatching.

 

I sell the bones on the street corner along with the healers selling their potions and the preachers selling their religion. The price depends on what you need and how desperate you look. Experience has taught me that the more desperate they are the more they’ll pay.

 

“Anything,” they say, “I’ll give you  _anything_.”

 

So I jack up the price. Hands and feet are the most expensive, not only because they’re what people want the most, but because they’re made up of so many tiny bones. And you can’t just sell them separately.

 

What these people do with the bones I never used to want to know. But one day you’ll hear them begging the healer, sobbing snot all over his robes and saying, “My wife, she was bitten, you have to help me.”

 

Most of the time the healer can’t help. These people let things get too bad and then nobody can help them. The healer says, “The best thing I can suggest is one shot to the head,” and he sells them a bullet for five dollars.

 

The trouble is that people are so optimistic. By the time the bite starts to spread and the area and the bone start to rot, it’s already too late.

 

The next day they come to me and buy a new shin bone for fifty dollars. I can pay my rent; they can piece their loved one back together. It never ends happily ever after, though. The disease doesn’t go away. But you aren’t going to tell them that.

 

Mike gets pissed off when I go body snatching. He’s sure one day I’m going to come home infected and eat him alive. The graveyard is hallowed ground, though, so I’m pretty much safe. The good thing about the infected is they can’t run as fast as the living.

 

So basically, only the dumb or love struck get bitten.

 

Our apartment is eight storeys up. And since Mike’s accident he can’t go down the stairs to get outside. I come home every morning with a bag of bones and smile tiredly at where he sits by the window, waiting.

 

“I feel like I should be helping you.”

 

“I know.” I say. “But I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to risk getting hurt too.”

 

“Chester. We both know I couldn’t help you either way.”

 

I don’t know what to say so I don’t say anything and empty the bones onto the dining room table.

 

“What if you didn’t come home one day?” Mike says, wheeling into the room after me. “What the fuck would I do?”

 

“That’s never going to happen.” I say as I head into the kitchen to fill a bucket with soap and water.

 

“What if it does?”

 

It’s not like I’ve never thought about this. The idea of Mike sitting by the window waiting for me to come back and he maybe sees me outside and a group of the infected, they jump me. They bite me. And Mike is pounding his fists against the window eight storeys up and screaming.

 

He’d die up there. Without a phone. Without any fresh food.

 

And the idea terrifies me.

 

So I blast the Fawcett to drown out the sound of his screams in my head.

 

He changes the subject as I head back into the dining room with the bucket and a cloth. I pick up a humerus and dip it in the bucket, washing it carefully with the soft cloth, drying it with a towel and laying it on the table.

 

“On the TV…they said the disease is airborne. They think.” He takes the radius I just cleaned and dries it for me. “They think the bites aren’t the only thing to worry about.”

 

The femur I’m cleaning, it could make us eighty bucks. From the dining room I can’t see down to the ground through the window but I can see the sky and it’s blood red.

 

It’ll be dark soon, and the infected will come out. And in the morning their loved ones will come to me to buy new bones.

 

Mike is looking at me, and he looks tired.

 

I’m tired too, of this life that we live.

 

We have rent to pay. And the milk in the fridge is past its expiration date.

 

I don’t think I’ll go out today. The people can wait. The desperate people who want to fix the unfixable, they can wait.

 

I put down the femur next to a skull and Mike goes, “Leg bone connected to the head bone?”

 

I sit down, my chair close to his wheelchair. “Huh?”

 

“Never mind.” He says with a tiny smile, takes my hand in his. “It doesn’t matter.”

 

**fin**


End file.
